This is not the first time I have talked of Auctions, and last week I was at one again when I sold several items of sheep handling equipment. This stuff is very useful when dagging and turning ewes over to tidy up their feet and udders.
We do not now have enough sheep to warrant the equipment, and so it has gone to people who will get its benefit. I’m happy with that as, on balance, I got about the same money that I bought it for, and so had the use of it for the cost of thirty years of inflation.
The same cannot be said for porcelain, furniture and bric-a-brac bought forty years ago in hope of a hedge against inflation. One will be mighty lucky to get the same price today as it cost in 1980.
But talking about clearing out items that were once useful or decorative, reminds me that I must clear out even more of the paperwork, manuals, reports, files, records, training material, notes, books, and other documentation accumulated during my sixty-six years of paid work, forty of which were self-employment.
I open many a drawer full of kilos of paper on which my life’s work is recorded and which my memory is built. I see before me the issues faced by those I was paid to help, their faces come to mind and their worries and their ambitions flood back. I read my analysis of their companies and the programmes of work performed to change their methods and processes, and even their thinking. All to help them manage their organisation’s resources and adapt to changes forced by market, technology, government, and social pressures. Thousands of sheets of evidence which are links in a chain showing how a human mind turns data into information which then the mind remembers as knowledge.
But that knowledge is now a part of ‘the person’ and can be adapted by the mind in which it resides. At some point the person adds their own experiences and can hope that somehow Wisdom results.
We may wish that other, less experienced folk, will want what we now have or hope that something of ourselves will be valued by younger folk. But they too are on a journey and rarely want, or even feel a need, for the reservoir of life that we have become.
Little wonder then that we are reluctant to throw away the content of our office drawers. Possibly the contents are the sum of what we are. We may even feel that our only value to others is contained therein. How can we throw away that which would render us as of no consequence?
But throw away we must, if only to save others the burden of a necessary task. A task which places on them the emotional cost of consigning a loved one to memory only.
Fortunately for the Christian, our value lies not in what we have done, it is in the mind of our Creator. The entire basis of Judaic Christianity came about because we are valued by the one who created us.
It is said that we see things more clearly on the final bend of the racetrack of life. For some, the final straight is the last opportunity to change lanes and to reflect on the ‘value’ we leave behind.
We can feel confident that as we empty the drawers and discard the token remainders of what we have done, we can pray the following, “Our Loving Heavenly Father. thank you for what we have become and for what you have given us.”
But before the race has run its course, we might pose the question :
In the auction of life, what price did the Creator pay for me?
View from the Pew 